Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—Long Live the Black Church
What is the black church and what does it mean to say that the black church is dead? A provocative assertion and prophetic challenge by a prominent interpreter of African-American religion occasions a lively and varied set of responses. Updated with a response to those responses by Eddie Glaude, Jr., whose article sparked the discussion.
Though he's frequently associated with the excesses of televangelism TD Jakes should be praised for doing the progressive thing.
After teaching them that the Black Church is their family, their home, our churches are failing our children in their time of need.
RD10Q: What is Black Religion?
William D. Hart's new book charts the black spiritual imagination through the journeys of Malcolm X, Julius Lester, and Jan Willis.
King and Obama—Don’t Get it Twisted
There is a temptation to regard Obama’s inauguration as the end of a forty year "wilderness" experience, but symbolism and symmetry can only take us so far. We, as citizens, are going to need to hold Obama accountable.
Awake from Dreaming: Forecasts and Fears of the Next Four Years
King’s reputation and influence suffered in the four years after his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even Obama, who rides high on a tide of popularity, is not immune to the vagaries of history.
This Year’s Best Books in African American Religion
New books by Anthea Butler, Willam Hart, Edward Blum, and Victor Anderson, among others, deepen the discussion of race and religion in the US.
The Most Popular Stories of 2008
The numbers are in and you, the reader, have chosen your favorite RD stories of the year; from Rick Warren to AIPAC, Sarah Palin, Creationism 2.0 and the fabled “death” of the religious right.
Rev. Ella Pearson Mitchell (1917-2008)
She was the dean of black women preachers, but she was also much more than that. Our lives are blessed by her memory.
Don't Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect
It has become common to blame the black community for the passage of California's same-sex marriage ban. A look at the statistics and logic put the lie to this seductive and simplistic narrative.
Doubting Obama: A Response to Harper's and Simon Critchley
Is authentic religious commitment incompatible with critical thinking, reason, or compromise, as philosopher Simon Critchley seems to imply in a recent essay on Obama? Or is our challenge to refuse the false oppositions between total transformation and conflict, or politics and piety?
Misdirected finger-pointing and flat-footed social analysis has accompanied purposeful protests and mass social action in the response to the passage of Prop 8.
History in Real Time: Teaching Obama
A professor of African-American religious history talks about teaching with a heavy heart, year after year, about the truths of racism. With the election of Barack Obama, this year will be different, but the journey of healing has only just begun.
A colleague suggests, in response to Andre Wills' recent RD article, that being evangelical is no more antithetical to the prophetic strand of the black church than R&B is to gospel music...
Does Obama's coded evangelical language signal a shift from black prophetic politics to the evangelical politics of personal salvation?
The Black Church: Institution or Abstraction?
Rev. Wright’s assertions that it’s really the “Black Church” under attack help reduce the complexity of the religious life of black America to a soundbite...
The Rev. Wright controversy begs the question: Has “The Black Church” outgrown its usefulness?
Obama supporters should “chill out” in the face of this swiftboating via the conflation of Obama and Wright into an undifferentiated brown blob of black radicalism broadcast together in a twenty-four hour news cycle.
Rev. Wright has been likened to his biblical namesake, but there’s a crucial difference between Wright’s rhetoric and that of the prophet Jeremiah...
Getting Wright Wrong: Preaching is Not Policy
Anyone who thinks that full agreement with your pastor is necessary has never been to church...
Op-Ed: Rev. Wright and the Church-State Divide
Agonized analyses about the proper relation between church and state too often miss the point.